—MZS & AS
Lost (ABC, 2004–2010) Total score: 95
The first season of Lost ended on a profoundly aggravating note. After spending months teasing viewers about what was inside a mysterious hatch that Locke (Terry O’Quinn) had found on the island where he and his fellow plane-crash survivors were trapped, the finale concluded with Locke using dynamite to blow the hatch open, followed by a swooping camera shot down past a broken ladder, followed by…
Nothing. See you in the fall, everybody!
When the show returned four months later, it didn’t waste additional time showing us who and what were in the hatch: a futuristic research station, manned by an unhinged Scotsman—who in time would be revealed to have the ability to project his consciousness across time, space, and even the veil of death—listening to Mama Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music” as he exercised, did laundry, and entered numbers into a computer every 108 minutes in an attempt to stave off the end of the world.
That, right there, is everything that was maddening but delightful about Lost. What other show would not only dare to frustrate its audience to that degree with the cliff-hanger but follow it up with such a bizarre yet riveting payoff? What other show could have its viewers cursing its very existence in one breath and then cheering at the top of their lungs the next?
For six seasons, Lost aimed higher, wider, and further than anyone could have expected from a show born out of the chairman of ABC’s desire for a scripted version of Survivor. In the process, it demonstrated how thin the line in television can be between inspiration and insanity, and for fandom, between love and hate. Only a show capable of moving us so deeply could make us so enraged when it screwed up.
Created in a rush by Damon Lindelof and J. J. Abrams, and eventually run by Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Lost mashed up different genres like they were unlikely smoothie ingredients, turned the island itself into as dense, complex, and physically impressive a fictional world as any TV has ever had, bounced backward and forward in time, and raised five new questions for every old one it answered.
It went big all the time, which meant sometimes it failed big, like the period when chief heroes Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) were locked in polar bear cages for several episodes while we found out where Jack got his tattoos. But it also meant that it often succeeded enormously. Before the fake-out with the hatch, first-season finale “Exodus” is a marvel, packed with suspense, action, black comedy, and every last tear the show could wring out of Michael Giacchino’s gorgeous score. The moment at the end of the fourth episode, “Walkabout,” which revealed that Locke was wheelchair-bound before he came to the island, is a spine-tingler in every sense. All throughout the series, up to and including the divisive final episode, there were soaring emotional moments that were possible only because Lindelof, Cuse, and company were attempting something that common sense and conventional TV wisdom would call risky at best, mind-bogglingly stupid at worst. I mean, they did a whole episode where Sawyer helped Hurley (Jorge Garcia) fix up an abandoned VW van they found on the island—not because there was any value to it at the time (though Hurley did later use it to run over a bad guy and save his friends), but because it would help Hurley get over his fear of being a jinx—and it’s among the ones I’m most eager to rewatch when the opportunity arises.
Look, did Lost do a satisfying job of resolving many of its mysteries? Not particularly. Sometimes, it was a victim of being the first show crowd-sourced by the Internet, as viewers teamed up on message boards to try to solve the mysteries—an option not available in the days of “Who shot J.R.?”—so that they figured out that Claire (Emilie de Ravin) was Jack’s half sister, or that Locke’s con artist father was the man responsible for the deaths of Sawyer’s parents, years before the characters on the show found out. But other times, the answers were just underwhelming, whether learning that the six castaways who briefly got off the island just happened to be the ones nearest a helicopter as it was flying away from an explosion, or, more glaringly, discovering that all the island’s weird properties and conflict could be traced back to a mysterious golden pool of light.
But if the business with the hatch at the end of “Exodus” hadn’t already conditioned the viewer to be underwhelmed by answers on the show (or at least to be incredibly patient about waiting for them), then dozens of moments since should have. Lost was always better with questions than answers. Yet, despite that, its finales tended to be its most potent, beloved installments, because in addition to explanations, they offered payoffs to spare in terms of action, plot, and character arcs.
However angry it still makes some fans to talk about the series finale all these years later, and however flawed the final season’s conception was of a “sideways” universe (revealed at the end to be a corner of the afterlife where all the island’s residents could reunite before going on to their final rewards), that last episode still offers ample thrills and tears and laughs. It doesn’t necessarily forgive some of the mistakes and odd choices made earlier that season, or in previous ones, but the great Lost moments and the baffling ones all came from the same genuine place, and the same messy process. The sideways universe may have not been the best use of time in the last season, but it gave us Sawyer’s awestruck reunion with his Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), and Kate, Claire, and Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) reexperiencing the birth of Claire’s baby, and the finale as a whole concluded Jack’s transformation from lovably flawed hero to petulant story obstacle and back again in a way that had to choke up even the most devout of Jack deniers. It all came together, even when it didn’t.
In some other sideways universe, there’s a more consistent, more logical, less puzzling version of Lost.
It’s probably also a lot less fun.
—AS
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–2003) Total score: 94
TV show titles rarely bring viewers into the tent, but they can keep them away. If you want to give your charming blended-family comedy an ironic name like Trophy Wife, don’t be surprised if your target demographic takes it literally and stays far away. (See also Terriers, Selfie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…)
Now, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran seven seasons, was never in danger of cancellation at any point (it jumped networks after season 5 only because UPN was looking to steal a hit from its rival the WB), launched a long-running (and, eventually, very good) spin-off in Angel, was beloved by its fans, and helped define the identity of an entire TV network for the short but memorable existence of the WB. By any standard you want to measure, Buffy was a success.
Except maybe this one: If you tell someone who’s never watched it that a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer is among the best TV dramas of all time, they will roll their eyes at you and change the subject to something less divisive, like immigration policy.
Would a Buffy the Vampire Slayer by any other name have been a crossover hit rather than a cult classic, or won more awards, or simply have been an easier sell to nonfans? Certainly, you can imagine WB executives thinking that, which is why they briefly tried to get Joss Whedon to shorten the title to just Slayer.
Whedon held firm, and not just because it might have created confusion between the show and the thrash band that brought the world songs like “Raining Blood” and “Mandatory Suicide.” He knew that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the perfect title for his series, because it captured the exact spirit of what he was planning to make.
You could give it a more serious or distinguished title, but no matter the packaging, the show inside would be about a vapid teenage girl, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who discovered that her destiny was to protect humankind from vampires, demons, and other creatures of the underworld, and a show whose tone shifted rapidly between horror, melodrama, action, and pure comedy. The name tells you all of that, and suggests that if you’re turned off by it, you’re probably not going to like the series to which it’s applied.
; It was a tonal balance that director Fran Rubel Kuzui didn’t even bother attempting with the campy Buffy movie adapted from Whedon’s first script. The show, though, would have room for many different emotions, all juggled expertly by Gellar, Anthony Stewart Head, Alyson Hannigan, and the rest of the cast. It was a series made cheaply even by the standards of TV’s fifth-place network, but it almost never seemed ridiculous despite the primitive effects and awkward stunt-doubling for Gellar. If it wanted to make you laugh at a bit of witty banter (“I laugh in the face of danger. Then I hide until it goes away.”), it could. If it wanted its latest monster to creep you out, it found the most disturbing context possible. And if it wanted to make you cry, it was pointless to try fighting it.
If anything, the exaggerated nature of the various undead villains only made the high school setting more effective, because what is adolescence if not a time when every problem gets blown wildly out of proportion?
In the real world, a girl whose boyfriend started treating her badly after they finally have sex wouldn’t need to worry that he had turned pure evil, as happened with Buffy and her vampire love interest Angel (David Boreanaz), but it might feel that way for a while. And a real teen boy going through the changes of puberty might occasionally imagine himself a monster, but laconic bass player Oz (Seth Green) actually transformed into a werewolf every time the moon was full.
Turning monsters into metaphors for teenage emotional turmoil was a clever gambit, and one that played particularly well during the show’s three seasons set in high school. Buffy is (by our rankings, anyway) one of the best TV shows ever set in high school, but it wasn’t entirely immune to the same problems that eventually beset all such shows when their characters head to college. Even so, those later seasons still had a knack for landing on the right parallel between the supernatural and the universal, like Buffy’s little sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) literally being put on earth to cause her problems (which in this case involved the literal end of the world).
(Those later years also offered some thrilling formal experiments, including “Hush,” an homage to silent horror movies, involving demons who rob people of the ability to speak or scream; “The Body,” a stripped-down outing where Buffy confronts the mundane reality of her mother’s death from natural causes; and the musical episode “Once More, with Feeling,” where a curse forces everyone to express their feelings through song.)
Back to that title. Whedon once suggested to the New York Times, “If I made Buffy the Lesbian Separatist, a series of lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming to the party, and it would be boring. The idea of changing culture is important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium.”
Whedon didn’t invent feminism in TV storytelling, or even the idea of cross-pollinating it with fantasy and sci-fi tropes. (For much of its run, Buffy overlapped with Xena: Warrior Princess.) But he created one of the finest examples of it, and wrapped it up in a wildly entertaining package that included a name that may have made some potential viewers roll their eyes, but that made enough of them smile and think this might just be a show for them.
And it was.
—AS
Freaks and Geeks (NBC, 1999–2000) Total score: 94
On New Year’s Day, 1962, a group of four young musicians arrived at the London office of Decca Records to audition for a recording contract. They played fifteen songs, but Decca rejected them because “guitar groups are on the way out,” and because the other band that day was local and would allow the label to save on travel expenses.
The band Decca signed? Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.
The band Decca passed on? The Beatles.
And for the rest of his life, some executive from Decca probably had to answer questions about rejecting the Beatles at every job interview, and likely had to lose every argument when his opponent started humming the opening bars to “She Loves You.”
Obviously, NBC’s decision to cancel Freaks and Geeks after eighteen episodes were produced (three of which never aired on NBC) wasn’t a financial calamity on the scale of Decca’s with the Fab Four. Freaks and Geeks was critically adored, but its ratings were terrible, even after NBC moved it from a Saturday night death slot to a more hospitable home on Mondays.
And yet… NBC at one time had under contract actors Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Jason Segel, not to mention Freaks creator Paul Feig, and executive producer Judd Apatow. Just counting those five men (and leaving out other contributors—say, writer Mike White, who would go on to pen School of Rock), their combined domestic box-office gross at the time of this writing is more than SIX BILLION DOLLARS. With a B. Oh, and Franco’s been nominated for two Oscars (and hosted the ceremony once), while Franco and Rogen made a movie that somehow nearly started a war with North Korea.
That level of success obviously wasn’t attainable for Freaks and Geeks, a small and uncomfortable-by-design story about teen outcasts in a suburban Michigan high school in 1980. But the DNA of that show is visible in some way in virtually everything those five have done since in defining the voice of twenty-first-century film comedy. And NBC had all of them—not to mention Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley (now working on a Spider-Man movie script), Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Samm Levine, and others—on one show! And a show that was at times just as gut-bustingly funny as the best moments of The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Superbad, and which had a level of poignance to which all those films aspire, even if they don’t get there as often as the gang did when they were all together here.
It feels appropriate that so many people involved in this unloved, unwatched show have gone on to such enormous commercial success—often by doing work very similar in style, tone, and/or theme to the show that NBC was so eager to be rid of. The series was about the transformational power of adolescence—how a stereotypical good girl like Cardellini’s Lindsay could one day decide to ditch the Mathletes and hang with the freaks, how Lindsay’s little brother, Sam (Daley), could briefly have a relationship with the most popular girl in his grade, how Daniel (Franco) wanted so desperately to be something other than the unofficial king of the burnouts—and the adults on the show were constantly telling the kids that who they were then wasn’t at all who they would become in the future. The head of the AV club promises geeks Sam, Bill (Starr), and Neal (Levine) that they’ll be much more successful as adults than the jocks and bullies who torment them now; the popularity of Knocked Up and The Heat and all these other projects feels like that prophecy coming true.
On a pure comedy level, Feig, Apatow, and company understood how to wring laughs out of adolescence’s most mortifying situations better than anyone has before or since. The show was both uncomfortable and hilarious in moments like Sam’s being laughed at as he tries to strut through school in his new baby blue “Parisian night suit,” or Segel’s Nick serenading an unhappy Lindsay (who joined the freaks because of a crush on Daniel but somehow ended up dating Nick) with an awful love song he’s written for her called “Lady L,” or a gym class dodgeball game being presented as an exercise in carnage akin to soldiers storming the beaches at Normandy. (Rogen, Franco, and Segel have become bigger draws, but it was Starr who was the show’s not-so-secret comic weapon, delivering every line in the most off-kilter yet sincere fashion and exhibiting a gangly abandon for scenes where Bill struggles to be a baseball star or tries to dance like Rerun from What’s Happening!!)
But the pain beneath those comic moments was never far from the surface, and it was in the intimate, knowing dramatic moments when Freaks and Geeks went from great comedy to all-time classic series. The writers were drawing on their own adolescent experiences, and it showed in the details, like latchkey kid Bill sadly making himself a grilled cheese sandwich but then cracking up as he watches Garry Shandling do stand-up on TV, or Lindsay and Kim (Philipps) cowering in terror inside Kim’s car as her angry, resentful stepfather threatens them both, or Daniel sitting on the floor of his bedroom, trying to experience the catharsis
of listening to Black Flag’s punk anthem “Rise Above” on headphones while being as quiet and still as possible so as not to wake his ailing father.
Later in that episode, Daniel dresses up in full punk regalia, and we would see nearly all the kids adopt different guises and costumes over the series’ short life. Lindsay briefly returns to the Mathletes, and later lies to her parents so she can spend a few weeks of her summer following the Grateful Dead with Kim. Neal dabbles in ventriloquism as a way to cope with his parents’ impending divorce. Rogen’s sarcastic, apathetic Ken falls hard for a girl who plays tuba in the school marching band (whom he later learns has ambiguous genitalia, in a story that made a bull’s-eye on the tiny overlapping target between sensitivity and comedy). Nick fails at becoming a drummer like his idol Neil Peart from Rush, and later discovers—to the dismay of both his friends and, on some level, himself—that he’s a great disco dancer. And the happiest we ever see Daniel is when he befriends Sam and the other geeks and joins them for a night of Dungeons & Dragons, where he gets to play a role within a role, dubbing himself Carlos the Dwarf.
That desire to transform wasn’t specific to suburban Michigan high school kids in 1980, but Freaks and Geeks found a way for the stories of these particular, beautifully drawn characters to speak to larger truths about growing up and wanting to be and feel anything other than miserable and alone. Sometimes the transformations worked out, like Lindsay and Kim improbably becoming best friends; other times it didn’t, like Sam dating his longtime crush, only to discover that she’s boring, conceited, and, worst of all, hates Caddyshack.
The heads of NBC at the time reportedly hated the show because it was much more serious, dark, and uncomfortable than they had expected. They complained that the freaks and the geeks needed to win more often.
They didn’t get the point. At all. Growing up is a struggle. It can be hilarious (especially from the perspective of someone not living the Sam and Bill moments anymore), and it can at times be rewarding, but it’s tough.
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